13 de novembro de 2011

Barnes & Noble is to expand its e-book service internationally next year, the company's chief executive has said. The development was revealed at the company's New York press conference at which it unveiled its $249 Nook Tablet, a direct competitor to Amazon's Kindle Fire and the Apple iPad.

William Lynch, chief executive of Barnes and Noble, told The Bookseller that publishers and consumers in the UK should expect an announcement within the next four months about the Nook going international. "We want to do it right," he commented. The comment has prompted speculation that the US chain could do a deal with Waterstone's, which has previously announced that it intends to develop an e-reader.

Amazon is demonstrating what they see as the value of securing the loyalty of digital book consumers for its ecosystem by their willingness to pay full wholesale price for an ebook that will then get lent once, as well as their penchant for pricing for sale well below their cost. The evidence that agency pricing is the only wall between a multi-channel ebook business and a single-retailer monopoly continues to grow. But as long as print in stores matters, and it will for a while longer, the Big Six have a legitimate commercial argument to defend ebook royalties between 25 and 50 percent. After that, everybody except Amazon will be hoping that that the Nook, Kobo, Google, and Sony market share is enough to keep it essential to an author to cover them all. And that means of discovery and merchandising will emerge that are a meaningful alternative to what is provided by the world’s biggest virtual retailer.

An inclusive ‘book’ marketplace perspective could change not only how we do business, the speed in which we do business but the relationships within the business? It could remove some of the adversarial and holier than thou attitudes that continue to dog the industry. It could create a new level of interest and participation that is more organic and spontaneous than today’s often ‘manufactured’ approach.

This holistic marketplace may appear unfamiliar, dangerous, exciting and to some a bridge too far, but it is the direction that technology, social networking and networks are clearly taking us today. We don’t fully understand the implications on today’s roles, processes and business and the route is somewhat dynamic and unpredictable but it is happening and the genie is not going back in the bottle.

The survey of more than 2,200 people, nearly three quarters of whom work in the industry, revealed that more than half (51.1%) of publishers now have a dedicated digital department or unit. Around one in five (22.8%) say they have increased their overall staff numbers as a result of the shift to digital.

But despite these efforts to reinforce digital publishing functions, many survey respondents still feel publishers are not adequately equipped to handle the opportunities and challenges presented by new and emerging digital platforms. Fewer than one in seven (13.4%) people think the industry is reskilling fast enough to cope with digital challenges.

Kobo just announced in the past hour that they’ve been sold to Rakuten, a Japanese web retail giant, for $315 million.

Details are still scarce, but the press release is already out and it covers the basics. Rakuten will be buying out everyone, including Indigo Books, who will be getting somewhere around $160 million for their chunk of Kobo. Not much will change after the sale. It’s already been announced that Kobo will continue to operate as an independent company and keep their offices in Toronto, NYC, and their other locations.

The ultimate ambition for publishers is of course to enable media convergence by producing and outputting publications simultaneously as multiple formats for delivery via proprietary and 3rd party distribution channels. To get there, considerable investment is required to inject xml and metadata into the early stages of workflows, build the required frameworks and infrastructure to support the workflows, and establish ongoing support and maintenance services. The extent of that investment depends on available budget and digital ambition, but it seems that both evolutionary and revolutionary strategies are necessary in publishing today, and it is useful for the sake of this argument that one of the words is combined within the other.

Just prior to October’s Liber Digital conference in Madrid, Planeta — the Spanish publishing house founded in 1949 in Barcelona — announced “e-circulo,” an initiative which will allow readers to “rent” e-books via e-streaming.

From 3 to 4 November 2011, about 40 specialists of e-collections from European libraries meet in the National Library of Portugal. The eBooks on Demand (EOD) libraries have recently launched a common search engine for finding books which already are or will be digitised, and will have hackdays in Lisbon for providing information from library catalogues and repositories in social web and other platforms.

The EOD search (http://search.books2ebooks.eu) currently makes available over 2.5 million records from 15 libraries, and gives direct access to already digitised items as well as books offered for digitisation on demand. “Our aim is that European cultural heritage would be only one mouse-click away from the readers and the EOD search enables that,” said Silvia Gstrein, the EOD Project Coordinator.

The best approach to promoting e-books is multiple approaches — feature them in general and targeted electronic and print newsletters, advertise online and in-store, train staff, and “just be relentless”— is the collective opinion of booksellers who recently talked to Bookselling This Week about e-book marketing — Paul Hanson of Village Books, Christie Olson Day at Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books, and Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the November 13, 2011 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending October 29, 2011.